#2473 - Bill Thompson

27:58And what people don't understand is if you don't spend that money, your budget for the next year will be lower because there's no need to have a higher budget. Instead of tying it to mission to say, did you achieve your mission objectives? We started the year agreeing from the president's framework, the NIPF, the National Intelligence Priority Framework, we wanted to achieve these effects. What you would want to hear is, we achieve them and we save 25%. But instead it's we achieved them, but we didn't execute all of this money. Well, you're fired. And I literally have seen that happen. I've literally seen that happen.

28:30And that kind of - What a sick society. Yeah. And that kind of shifted my thinking in that these systems have their own incentive to exist and to grow because those guys that were holding that general officer, that 06's, that colonel's feet to the fire, they also have an incentive to, because they were part of that trickle down and they've got bureaucracy that surrounds them. And if they didn't execute it, that means they didn't execute it. And that means they have to go to whomever. This was during the Biden administration. I believe Hegseth, for everything we could say, has actually tightened this up quite a bit.

29:03And he's kind of rehauled the way development works, especially on the offensive cyber side. But they have bureaucracies. And the incentive of the bureaucracy is to make sure that we grow. And that's it. And then you think about that for a minute. And you're like, well, it's no longer a question why we have$30 trillion of debt. $39 trillion. $39 trillion. and then what, like$150 trillion of unfunded liability. In other words, we've promised people money for the next 30 years. And it's debt that, you know, I don't see how we'll ever escape that debt. And it's the thing about it is, and I don't want to be pigeonholed because I'm actually quite liberal when it comes to, my politics are like yours in that I'm kind of a man without a home.

29:46But they also change at different levels of analysis. I'm very liberal with my family. and I'm very like communist. I protect them. I give them everything they need. I'm trying to give them structure. And even in my community, I'll help someone out out of pocket or do something for them. That's a strain on my time or might hurt something else because there are really no solutions. There's just trade-offs. That's supportive for the community though. That's how people are supposed to do charity. And I'm also very nonjudgmental in someone how they care. I don't care what they do in their house. I don't care if it's a Roman orgy on the weekends, Like be a predictable, productive person Monday through Friday and go do your Roman orgy on the weekend.

30:23I don't care. I won't judge you. Like I don't – I really have enough crap in my own life. As long as someone's not getting hurt. Yeah, as long as no one's getting hurt. Consenting adults. Like I have enough problems and I screw up enough and people have – there's a laundry list of things that people can say about me, how I've screwed up in my life. But then as I graduate and get higher and higher, more conservatism takes place. and that's a result of just having an engineering mindset when I'm looking at life and understanding that it's just not Republican or Democrat or leftist or rightist or liberal or classically liberal.

31:01All of these monikers don't work for me because they break down at some level of analysis. Right. I think that's the problem. I think the problem is these ideologies that people subscribe to where you have a predetermined pattern of thinking that you're supposed to adopt. Yes. You're supposed to adopt these opinions. And some of them just don't fit. And that's how people get pigeon... That's like people on the left. They get pigeonholed into weird stuff that you can't really, really justify, like trans women in sports. Like, what the fuck are you doing? You know, like, we're, you know, we're being inclusive.

31:31Like, no, you're not. Or loving the borders of Ukraine while hating our own border. Yeah. Fucking bonkers. Yeah. There's so many crazy things. There's so many crazy things that people just adopt that don't make any sense And you know when you subscribe to an ideology the problem is if like if you you define yourself as this person I am this I am a hardcore right-wing blah blah, whatever it is You you immediately close the door to all the very productive and interesting things of the other side thinks Yeah, and you're also making yourself into a tool of propaganda Because if I if someone if I meet someone and they just say I'm this right It's like, well, I could reasonably predict everything that's going to come out of your mouth.

32:12Yeah. That's not entertaining. I don't want to have a conversation with that person. Right. I can't seek to learn from them because I could just pick up the Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf and have a pretty good understanding of who I'm dealing with. And therefore, a conversation is not relevant. It's not needed. A lot of people are afraid of social ostracization, too. So they're afraid of straying outside of the narrative, whatever side they're supposed to be on. and you know some groups are really good at making you feel like dog shit if you don't agree entirely with even things that don't even make any sense yeah so that's why people go along with stuff that's illogical like open borders or whatever it is yeah they go along with things that's not in their best interest because they're scared they're scared of being ostracized they're scared of being cast out of the kingdom there's you know they're scared of being excommunicated yeah i dealt with a lot of people first when I retired from the military and then more recently um leading up to the last election where you know I was entertaining the deal of doing some work for government um believe it or not and because I'm as we talk more you'll figure out I'm pretty anti institutions I'm really uh against those types of things but I really felt if you would have asked me three years ago how I felt about the Trump election and all of that stuff I was very excited because he was saying a lot of things that I wanted someone to say Trump fits a pattern and this is what people I think kind of lack when they My whole life is built around pattern analysis.

33:39I really do a patterns and exhuming exhuming and looking into patterns and there's a pattern of like a You'll laugh when I say this first part of the pattern, but then I'll make it make more sense later But he fits the pattern well first he's a jacksonian and and and in that he's a pragmatic person the way that he governs which i liked or at least i did and you know there's some things he's done recently that i don't enjoy and um but he's also a an outsider or a savior type a la you know i don't remember the movie but the magnificent seven back in the day i don't remember the actor's name there's this group of, you know, there's this Western town, everything's going to shit.

34:23These seven guys walk in. I think Chris Pratt remade it with Denzel Washington or someone else. Oh, really? I think so. I can't remember. But there's an old one that I used to watch from my grandpa. God, there's too many movies. Yeah. And there's this pattern where you wouldn't invite these guys to a dinner party. You wouldn't want them in church on Sunday. But when a system is so corrupt and so horrible, you have to rely on these types of people to come in and be a check to the system. But then also you don't want them to stick around when the system is reset So there's a scene in the movie where he says, you know man these this set these seven guys are talking They said man these people must have really wanted us like it's crazy They must be happy.

35:01We're here and I think it's Gary Cooper or someone or one of these guys says looks at him and says They're gonna be even happier when we leave and Trump kind of fits that narrative Wolverine from the X-Men would be another one who fits this narrative like is he gonna be at the X-Men Christmas party? No, right. Is he trying to hit on Scott Gray's wife Cyclops? I'm a comic nerd. So I'm sorry Is he trying to hit on is trying to sleep with Cyclops his wife? Yes Did he chop a guy's head off and throw it at a car? Yes, but we're about to go face Galactus and we're gonna need him and so we have to put up with all of this other stuff because we understand that when the system is Corrupt at every level you need to someone who's outside of the system to come in and set the system, right?

35:42It's a Western pattern as well. Other people who fit this would be like Patton, married his cousin, slapped soldiers. Did he really? Yeah, I think it was his third cousin. How many cousins removed? Does it become okay? I don't know. Is it third? Fourth? If there's blood. Have you never met them? I'm Icelandic, so I really can't say anything. They literally have apps in Iceland. My grandparents and my great-grandparents are all from Iceland. They settled in Manitoba, Gimli, Manitoba, which is this Icelandic community and they literally have apps in Iceland to make sure you're not dating your cousin.

36:16So, you know, you know, less than such a small community, less than a million people on one island, you know, it's so you're trying to prevent that stuff. But anyway, um, Patton, yeah. Uh, slap soldiers who had tuberculosis, one of them probably had cell shell shock. It got in the newspaper. They wanted his head. And thankfully the generals were like, no, he's the guy that we need for the moment. Right. He had the ivory pistols and he dressed like, not like a general. He didn't talk like a general. He wasn't like a Eisenhower where he had the veneer of a general. But we knew he was the only guy we could have at the Battle of the Bulge.

36:51Like the Germans talked about him like he was already a mythic legend in his lifetime. But part of this pattern that people should understand or when they examine this pattern is it never ends well for these antiheroes. They're always killed or defamed in the final analysis. so when the Magnus 7 come in they'll go to another town and I'll get killed when Patton retired he died in some weird jeep accident Wolverine he's the only guy left on this desolate world where the Hulk's in charge and it's a horrible existence Patton, or not Patton Petraeus is another one I briefed Petraeus, I worked for not for him but for people who worked for him in Iraq and he was the guy that got us through with the surge but he was really a weird guy when you would talk to him.

37:41Like you knew that he knew something you didn't and that he was seeing things that you weren't. But even for myself as being like a chief warrant officer at that time, a low-level technician, he would ask questions like he got it. He didn't act like other generals. Like other generals would have their three things they want to talk about and they'd want to get out of Dodge. He would ask questions that really had implications. And he is another one of these outsiders who came in to write a system that was not working vis-a-vis Iraq in 2006. And then what happens to him when he leaves? They put him in charge of the CIA.

38:13They knew he had been screwing around with this woman. And they're like, okay, he served his function. Now he needs to get out of Dodge. And now he's got tried for all these things and sleeping with someone while he wasn't married. It's not a ceremonious end for these types. Is that really what happened to Petraeus? That's how he ended? Yeah, he was sleeping with some girl that was writing his book or something along those lines. That's it? While he was married? Yeah, I'm not saying that's the end of him. Right. All I'm saying is that history will remember the pattern is ending unfavorably. You know what I'm saying?

38:49And so when I examined Trump, I said, yeah, I don't like what he says. I wouldn't want him around my daughters. I wouldn't want him at a dinner party. But he seems to be saying these things like he's going to reset this system. And, you know, I think it was Chappelle was on your show or another show or someone like that where he talked about Hillary saying, you know, something about the tax loopholes or whatever. And he just hit right back at her and said, well, you're the people who are funding your campaign. Take advantage of those same loopholes. And if they're there, I'm going to take advantage of them.

39:18I wouldn't be a pragmatist if I didn't. When he started saying stuff like that, it seemed to me like he was going to upend this system. The jury's out on that because I don't know how I feel these days. We can get into that if you need to or if we want to. But he's an outsider personality, and I thought he was going to really reset the system. And there are good things that are happening. If I were to grade him, I would probably give him a C plus or a B minus. He's certainly better than what was happening under Biden. I was still in the military when Biden was in charge, and it was awful to say the least.

39:50What were the problems? Oh, my goodness. Books that general officers were being told to read and that I as an advisor were being told to read. books like white rage, like understanding why your problem, uh, you as a white man are a problem in the modern day military because, um, this whole thing's built on systemic racism. You have inbuilt implicit bias that you can't escape even if you wanted to, or you recognized it is woke politics. Yeah, it was woke politics. And it was, um, and it was, uh, you know, I would sit there and say, you know, all of the friends, all of the people that I know who've died during this war, not all of them, but 80 % of them.

40:28And the numbers bear this out when you look at them. They're all white guys from the middle of the country who were on their farms or, you know, not all of them, 80 % of them. I think the numbers bear out about 80 % of them were these guys from the Midwest or these places where they didn't really have a lot going. And they went off to fight a war that we probably shouldn't have been fighting in the first place, especially in Iraq. And they died for their cause. And, uh, and now you're saying that those people who make up the majority of the combat deaths are somehow part of this problem and that other people aren't benefiting from it.

41:01I don't believe race to me is disgusting. Even to talk about someone's race, even, you know, on both sides of the spectrum, when they were, you know, electing that Supreme Court justice, I can't remember her name right now off the top of my head, just because I'm a little nervous still. She was black and they were talking about how it's historic because she's black. And Biden had said he's going to hire a black woman to do this job. If I had worked my whole life to do something, but now I'm only being elevated to this next position because of my gender and the color of my skin, I would turn that job down so fast because that's not what I want to be known for.

41:37These are immutable characteristics that I'm not in control of. I didn't choose to be born white or with blue eyes. I didn't choose to be born in a trailer park in the middle of nowhere without a dad at five. I didn't choose any of those things. I don't see how I benefit from these things at the individual level. And the individual level of analysis for me is really the only way to evaluate someone for their pluses and their minuses. And anything beyond that to me is discriminatory on its face. Of course. It's just a great way to control people because you pit people against each other that way.

42:09And it's just an awesome way that they can stay in control and make everybody walk on eggshells and think that they've victimized people in order to get to their position. and they have to be shameful of who they are that they had no control over. It also gives people an easy rubric to judge other people. Yeah. Because nothing's easy really. And it gives them like white guy bad, you know, black guy good, Chinese guy, as long as he's not applying to the college I want to get into, he's good. Right. And it gives people, people want easy answers really at the end of the day. They want to be told the easy rubric to navigate life because really none of it's easy And it requires discipline, like you said before, and thought.

42:51And so it was that stuff in the military. I remember getting told in an equal opportunity briefing we were getting, it doesn't matter what you meant when you said what you were saying. It only matters what the person felt when you said it. They said that in a military briefing? It was a military equal opportunity briefing. And the example they gave was if a woman walks into the, like we worked with a lot of civilians at this military organization where we're developing these offensive cyber capabilities, a lot of civilians in there. And so if, you know, woman X walks in today and she's got a dress on and the thought in your head is I'd like to get my wife that dress or something like it or find out where she bought it.

43:36And you just say, that's a nice dress. Anyway, here's the TPS reports. if she heard something sexual or didn't like the connotation or whatever, there's going to be an investigation. You're going to be pulled out of that office. This is all going to happen despite what you meant. So the idea probably was good. We want to prevent sexual harassment inside of the office. But it was weaponized. But it was weaponized and it was carried out in a way where it's only about how people feel and not what a reasonable person standard would be in a particular situation. and from the time I joined the military until that time we'd been at war my entire time in the military we were at war um I deployed throughout my career and I wouldn't say that I was a war horse I was not a long tabber I was not a cool guy kicking in doors it was my job with the as the guy with you know tape over his glasses to point out the door for someone else and say bad guys in there um so I was not you know a super badass in that regard I was a nerd for super badasses and um but we also all engaged in gallows humor and we would you know the jokes and stuff even someone even someone who had recently died we would make a joke about it's because you have this tremendous uh pressure and comedy is the relief valve for that in a lot of ways yeah of course and but then someone would overhear that joke or something and now you're looking down the barrel of a 15-6, which is a military investigation.

45:02And all of these things that could permanently impact your life in a way and give you a scarlet letter to where you could never be employed again or do anything ever again, because you were simply trying to relieve some pressure or you were trying to find out where to buy your wife at the next dress. And now your life's being ruined. And I know guys who suffered under that sword. Like I wouldn't name them, But I know guys who, you know, their career met a terminal end because of a dumb joke or something. It's like you can't be expected to go out and shoot people in the face and then be sensitive to someone's feelings an hour later.

45:36Right. It's just it doesn't it does not work. Now, should you talk to that guy and say, hey, you know, you made woman X feel so and so. Be more cognizant of that whenever you're around her in the future. Well, you should also have a rational discussion with the woman. Yes. And what did he ask you? He said, where did you get that dress? It's very lovely. I'd like to get one for my wife Why were you upset at that like what does this is this rational like how you can't be in an office? If you're that sensitive like it's one thing if the guy said I'd like to get you out of that dress Well, okay now now we're now you're in a different world hundred percent hundred percent right yeah If someone says you look great, you know, have you lost weight?

46:14You look fantastic. That's the that's a compliment Yeah, and if someone gets upset I felt sexually objectified I felt harassed like okay. He just said you look great. Yeah, that's it healthy. It's not you look great I'd like to get you naked now. We've crossed the Rubicon right now. We're into sure for sure But just you look great or I like your dress That's like if you said that to a man like hey great suit. Yeah, he's like I need to file a complaint Yeah, I need to file a complaint. Yeah, you've trimmed up Joe. You're looking great bill Like oh my god, I'm being harassed I need it like complaint.

46:48That would have worked during the Biden administration. That is fucking crazy. That would have worked. That's so crazy. And the other thing that they were doing in this briefing, which is where I kind of, you know, the last couple of years of my military career, I got in trouble a couple of times, or I should say called down. I was a senior. I was a CW4. I was one rank from the top. I was advising two star generals, colonels on very important matters. I wasn't high. I was I wasn't high in the in the dominance hierarchy, but I was adjacent to people who were as an advisor. And the amount of – in this briefing in particular, they had gotten into – it's bad that there are so many white people.

47:31I'm doing high points here, but we need more diversity. I was part of an accepted career program that they were starting to call like the old white boys network because most of the people – so the requirements for this network were you had to speak a couple languages. languages, you needed an engineering degree or some kind of demonstrated engineering background. You had to have deployed. They wanted you to speak the language very well. They wanted you to be able to go through these engineering courses, these other things. And what happens naturally is you now need people who are interested in engineering.

48:05All right. So you've got somebody who's maybe more constrained in their thinking. You need somebody who speaks languages. Well, now they also need to be kind of, you know, speak French, speak Russian, whatever it was. So they had to have studied or lived in an area and done this. And they need to be able to go through these crazy tactical and strategic types of courses. By virtue of those things, you're going to get men. And there were lots of women, but then there'll be more white men. And it's not because the pool presented itself that way. Now you have to extract from that pool. And so in this briefing, when they were talking about like the old white boys network or how we need to change things.

48:45I said, you know, do you realize that most men are, have more in common, um, than most women? Or like if there's a, if, if, if I, if I say I need more diversity in a particular room, if you said diversity of thought, I'd be fine with that. But, but Joe and, you know, random black guy in the, in the same program, in the same office have far more in common than the white woman. But if all, but what you're saying is these people need to have all separate different colors and different, like all of this needs to be this way. It's going to naturally present itself that way because men in the military generally are disagreeable.

49:23Men in the military who like engineering are generally hyper disagreeable. And the only difference between these two people is the pigment of their skin. So this fake diversity quota that they're putting on top of us doesn't achieve anything other than giving some officer a bullet on their OER. And, you know, I got pulled into the office afterward. I said way more than that, but essentially afterwards they were like, hey, chief, you can't say that in those briefings. Like the way that you were getting animated in there and what you were saying, what you're doing, like, yeah, this is not going to fly.

49:54And this was like 2018 or 2019 or something. Just being rational. Yeah, just trying to be rational and say that there's more difference in groups than there is between groups. and that the similarities and the way that things stack up, you recruit from a pool of volunteers and candidates. If I'm recruiting from a pool of volunteers and candidates who are 80 % male and white, I have to expect that the selected individuals are going to be male and white. The majority of people who join the military, I don't control this. I'm just, as an engineer, I'm looking at statistics. Also, if you want a highly functional, productive group, it's got to be based on meritocracy.

50:31Yeah, for sure. For sure. Has to be. Anything other than that is literally a threat to national security. Yeah, you're denigrating lethality. Yeah. The role of the army is to deter war through exuding superior military fighting and technology. And when deterrence fails to win, that's it. Those are the two things that we need to do with our military. It needs to look like the guy in the playground who you would not muck about with. And if you were to muck with him, he will beat you senseless. That's it. Now, whether or not we should be using that all the time or how we use it, that's a separate question.

51:04But the entity itself needs to comport itself in this way. Otherwise, you are endangering this truly special experiment, which at least in its beginnings valued the individual. It valued individual rights and states' rights. And the founders, and this was another thing I said in that briefing, was the founders knew, yes, they were all slaveholders. but they knew that the constitution and the bill of rights and the declaration of independence would eventually lead to a system where we had to acknowledge these people as people. And we fought a civil war where a million white dudes died to see this experiment through.

51:45The scaffolding was there. You have to look at the things, the zeitgeist of the time. If they had just said, nope, everyone's going to be free. There will be no slaves. You would have never gotten ratification through the southern states, but they knew that there are, and when you read the Federalist Papers, they knew that they were erecting this system. When you look at Thomas Jefferson and some of these other great thinkers who, yes, he owned slaves, I get it. They knew what they were building and they knew what would ultimately terminate in. And then we had a civil war where we destroyed our country from the inside to see this dream come about.

52:19And now we're just going to all go back and say they're all slave owners. I know this has all been said here a million times. But this stuff animates me because it's built with blood and treasure. Well, it's also, you can't judge people from the past based on the standards of the present. For sure. Because culture changes, people understand things better. We have a much greater recognition of what was wrong with things 100 years ago, 200 years ago. And I'm sure in the future, we're going to look back on today with the same lens. It just always works that way. Did you know Joe had a gas powered car?

52:55Exactly. That kind of stuff. Yeah. Did you know that? You consumed more. You flew more. You ate more meat. You did whatever you did. Yeah. You were a problem. He was a problem. Yeah. And now why would we ever, like I'm voting to get rid of the Joe Rogan experience from the National Archives because he drove a gas car. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like someone stores your stuff for profundity's sake for the future to hear about this. You know, I've always loved your podcast, Joe, and it was because you're a genuinely curious person. And I'm not kissing your ass right now. You're a genuinely curious person that was saying things that were not in the current zeitgeist at the time.

53:32And you refuse to apologize for it. And it led to a lot of great things. But it led to an updating of the system. And you did it with dialogue, with the dialogos, with, you know, two people trying to learn things about each other. and it led to an updating of a system. I think it's very important for culture to have free and open dialogue so we can update our system. So bad ideas can die so we don't have to die instead of our bad ideas. Because if I can't express a bad idea, I have to act it out. And if I act out the bad idea, it could kill me. And the celebration of good ideas. And the celebration of good ideas.

54:06And it's just really, there's just been such a weird inversion in politics where the free hippie loving liberals of yesteryear are now the ones telling you what words you can use. There are no borders, all of these crazy things. Um, and I always say to people, I said it to Andy, some fun, my last podcast with him. I'm like a 1996 Bill Clinton Democrat. If you go watch state of the union and he talks about lowering debt, getting out of debt, actually working with Newt Gringrich to get out of debt, um, securing the borders, making work and education freely accessible um i'm voting for that guy i know isn't it crazy that i mean that's why the problem of labels doesn't work ideological labels because if you go back far enough and look at clinton for example he's one of the best ones and by the way did balance the budget yeah he did he actually we had a surplus when he left the office yeah amazing did a fucking amazing job so he got his dick sucked yeah who didn't back then that's the other thing judging people by the standards of the past, JFK doesn't look so good in the Me Too movement.

55:15Right, exactly. I mean, he would have got canceled. It's like you have to recognize that this ideological bubble that we find ourselves in left versus right, Bill Clinton does not fit in that. Bill Clinton is securely on the right in terms of 1996 standards applied to today. He would never want to hear that. No, he would never want to hear that because he's kind of shifted with the zeitgeist because That's what you kind of have to do if you want to stay in your party and be protected by your party Yes, you know, but he's essentially he had a lot of the I mean we've talked about this before We've played clips of Hillary Clinton from 2008 and she's more maga than maga You know her her take on the border was like hardcore Yeah, it was hardcore if you've been convicted of a crime get out You know if you stay here pay a stiff penalty and you have to get in line and you have to learn English and everybody cheers Yeah.

56:08Like that is a hardcore right wing 2026 perspective. Obama did it too in 2012. Absolutely. And Obama deported more people than Trump. Yes, exactly. Yeah. This episode is brought to you by ThreatLocker. Data breaches are happening more frequently than ever. And it's not because of sophisticated tactics. Attackers are using the same methods and exploiting the same vulnerabilities. What's changed is speed and scale. Reacting to breaches can leave you exhausted, constantly chasing threats instead of preventing them. That's where ThreatLocker comes in. With ThreatLocker Zero Trust, you only allow what you need and block everything else by default.

56:51You control what runs, when, where, and how, blocking ransomware before it executes. Because no matter how you respond, a fast response simply isn't fast enough. Visit threatlocker.com slash JRE to learn more. And it's just, I'm not saying, like my thought is I'm always updating. I'm always updating my systems. I'm always getting told things. I always have a pre-prescribed way of looking at the world that I'll have a good conversation with someone and I'll update my system. But generally, my principles are in place. And when you watch these people who get into their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, and their core foundational principles are changing, that really should give you cause for concern.

57:36Because like you were saying this at this time and now you're saying this at that time. It's like generally my rubric that I don't think will change about myself is I'm fervently for the individual and I'm fervently for truth. And that we can – that the world, you should measure it and look at not what your intentions are but what the outcomes are. And then evaluate the system and how it scales based on those outcomes. Those are – that's principally if you – I try to live that standard up to myself. I fall short of that standard all the time. It's part of being a human. I try to live by that standard.

58:10And I feel like that will always be me even into my 90s. Unless something goes horribly wrong, right? Right, right. And I've pretty much been here since the past seven or eight years or so. Even into my 30s, I wasn't quite sure who I was as a human. But I'm pretty steadfast in that. And the amount of opportunities and the amount of goodness in my life and my children and my home and the things I've been able to do have really been born out of that last seven years of the truth is going to be the top of the decision matrix for me, the top of the hierarchy for me. I'm going to try not to cut corners whenever I can and help good people around me.

58:54and the truth is the way that I'll organize and function myself in life and that I will try to only judge people as individuals. And the world, you know, these are Christ's teachings from 2 ,000 years ago, but the world for me has just opened up in a way that I could have never predicted using a very simple rubric. It's not easy, but it's simple. And if more people just took those, and this isn't me. I didn't come up with this. This is the result of, you know, watching a bunch of experiments go bad. But if people just adopted that very simple thing and just tried it for three months, you'll feel better about yourself.

59:31You'll feel better about the world. You feel better about the people proximally around you. It might make you hate the government more. Yeah. But I don't think if you don't hate the government, I think you're not paying attention. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, when you were working in cyber defense, like what? Cyber offense. Cyber offense. What was the primary function? Like, what did you do? So in the beginning, I have no short answers and I apologize. I don't like short answers. Yeah. I always feel like I'm - I like a good long answer. Don't worry about that. Okay. When I joined the military, I was in signals intelligence and essentially learning the ins and outs of radars, how radars work, what they do, how they function.

1:00:17Did you guys ever see any weird shit? Like UFO shit? I wish I had. I really do. I wish you had too. Yeah, I really do. I was more in the signals intelligence side of the house, focusing first on electronic signals or emanations from radars, mapping them so that if we were going to go do the ground invasion and there was going to be some air support going in first and blowing shit up, we would tell them, hey, there's a man-packable SA-7 here. There's a SA-10 here. There's this here. There's there. And then telling these pilots so they didn't get shot out of the sky. um quickly when the war kicked off that became irrelevant because there was no you know surface air missiles surface to surface missiles in iraq we had knocked them all out in the first few weeks so then it shifted to communications intelligence so i kind of retrained on communications intelligence and that was at that time off of cell phones off of uh push-to-talk radios repeaters um long-haul networks terrestrial networks extraterrestrial networks and what i mean by that is the stuff satellites in the sky and doing analysis on those to try to inform the what we call the common operating picture of the battlefield for a combatant commander so command commander wants to know where the bad guys are what they're doing what they're saying to the event to the amount that we could my job was to come up with solutions and conduct you know passive and active signals analysis on these things and then inform the commander so that we could you know mitigate risk it was all about mitigation of risk um for this is 2008 or so i'd been doing this for about seven years eight years and um from there it shifted to the phones getting smart and essentially it went from you walking around with a 2g phone or a 3g phone that had limited compute capability to now there's robust compute capability with the advent of like the iphone and now it's like well now we've got to get after guys who are you know essentially walking around with a computer we could never have envisioned 20 years ago in their pocket with all this capability.

1:02:16Because the military and our forces that we're fighting against, it all comes down to our ability to shoot, move, and communicate. Communication being the part that I was focused on. So as the advent of the iPhone and those things came out, the Army realized we didn't have a computer network operations MOS. We didn't have a offensive cyber component. We didn't have a defensive cyber component. So we kind of, I was there at the ground floor when we were building out these new MOSs now that are all over the military. But at that time, there was a thought going into, you know, we need to have people who know how to be on-ed operators.

1:02:49Ethical hacking, as paradoxical as that sounds. That's how the lawyers called it that. So it's hacking at the end of the day, but ethical hacking because you've got the backing of the U.S. government. And so we set up that framework and really started launching into operations, you know, 2006, six, seven, eight, all the way into my last deployment in 2017 or 2017, it was all focused on computer network operations and how they lash up with terrestrial networks. How do we exploit all of that was one facet of my job. And your question was, how did I get into all of that? And that was the - How do you get into it?

1:03:28What was the operational aspect of it? How did you actually, what did you do? So, you know, there's there's I'll stick to terms that are more generally understood by the public, but learning how to do things like war driving, collecting on networks, Wi-Fi, you know, endpoints, cell phones, understanding the ins and outs of them, understanding how to do forensic analysis of them. So after there was an operation and a bunch of guerrillas had been sent in to kill the bad guy, we could derive maximum intelligence value from the handset to plan other operations. And so, you know, it would be passive monitoring of networks to inform the intelligence picture, which would lead to either combat operations or active computer network operations.

1:04:20where now it's like, well, there's, you know, a, uh, I don't know, a, uh, an Iraqi or an Afghani router that hasn't been patched in three years. And we think we can either write or find a zero day, which is just an exploit of those routers where, um, we can muck with their router in a way where they think they're getting a good information and they're not, or they're, or or erecting other things to mitigate risk for the commander. And so that really, you know, exploded at that point. And between that and human intelligence, which is kind of the... The actual gathering of intelligence from other people, you know, you would call it spy or, you know, James Bond, but that's James Bond was a horrible spy.

1:05:06Was he? I mean, yeah, you know, your job's to remain anonymous and you're walking into a casino and there's Goldfinger calling you by your first and last name. It's not a great look. You know, generally you don't want to be sleeping with your sources or, you know, using a real name or whatever. So human intelligence and then my focus for the last 10 years was how does signals intelligence computer network operations become a force multiplier for people conducting overt and clandestine operations throughout the theater at that time. My, you know, my deployments and my time was spent in Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, Northern Africa.

1:05:47And then a lot of people don't know it, but we were in active combat operations in the Southern Philippines as well for a fair amount of time. I want to maybe say seven or 10 years. We were doing combat operations in the Southern Philippines. My first deployment to the Southern Philippines was 2007. Who were we doing operations against? So there were terrorist elements down there that were traveling back and forth from Pakistan and Afghanistan. And there was a terrorist organization down there called the Abu Sayyaf Group. And there were other ones as well. Jamaa Islamia, I think, was the name of the other one.

1:06:24And they were conducting their own terrorist anti-Christian operations in the southern part of the Philippines. In the southern part of the Philippines, can I say it? Can I say the word? What do you mean? Jamie, can you pull up a map of the Philippines? Can you pull it up? Oh, say that. Say that term. Yeah, pull it up, Jamie. Been listening to it forever. So there's what's called the autonomous region of Muslim Mindanao, which is the southern part from like a place called Zamboanga down to Hulu or Holo Island. And there's a, it's a funny joke because if you zoom into Zamboanga, which is. God, look how many islands are in the Philippines.

1:06:57I know. Go down to the south there. See Zambo. Go down right there. Zoom right there on that island. Now move to, sorry, now move to the southwest. You see that penis? Mm-hmm. At the tip of that penis is called Zamboanga. Mm-hmm. All of our combat operations, now if you zoom out a little bit more and pan more south, and zoom out just a little bit more so the joke hits, all that sperm south of the tip of the Zamboanga city, there are terrorist operations in here. Now, if you go to that main island called Sulu, there's Holo Island. That's where I was on this tiny island out in the middle of nowhere.

1:07:37And on that, there's a mountain. That's all the Philippines? Well, no. I mean, this is all the Philippines down here, yeah. Wow. So this is called, there's a mountain in there. I think it was called Mount Tumatok or something like that. On the eastern part of the island called Luke. It's called Luke. Yeah. So there's mountains. There's a mountainous region there. There are a bunch of terrorists up there. They were killing people in the area, conducting bombings. They were getting trained. In fact, there was a guy, and I believe, I'm going to get his name wrong, perhaps. But I believe his name, it was either Insulan Haplon.

1:08:07or oh it's jamar patek jamar patek he was actually arrested outside of osama bin laden's compound the day after he was killed we were trying to kill him on that island or in and around that island is where we were trying to find him and kill him uh so they're terrorist facilitators um they did the uss coal bombing was zoom back out i want to see the philippines one more time like all the islands when you zoom all the way out it's so nuts how many islands are yeah so up north up north of Manila is mostly the Christian population. And as you get down south, it's the autonomous region of Muslim men now.

1:08:42And that is all of where these terrorist operations were happening. And I believe that mostly pulled out of there. There might be still some people in Zamboanga. I'm not sure anymore because it's been five years, four years since I retired. But, yeah, we were doing counterinsurgency operations down there. And guys died down there. And there were combat operations. And I was out there. I was in a tactical military intelligence battalion and I was attached to the first special forces group and we were down there a couple of times and a lot of people don't even know about it. So. Yeah. I never heard about it.

1:09:14Yeah. So anyway. I'm sorry. No, no. Sidebar, but I'm so stunned at how many islands are in the Philippines. It'll spread out of this. Yeah. It's, it's insane. And the, the, the thing about it is, is I go to all of these little outposts and these out islands. We were always debriefing these guys and I'm going to get these terms wrong so I'm sure there'll be people in the comments but I think they were called bongarize or something like that but they were like these mayors of each one of these little islands and there'd be terrorists in and around those areas and we'd try to make friends with these guys so they'd give us some information um and every one of those places was absolutely beautiful like you'd go there and be like man Hilton could turn this into something in a short order right you know when you're out of these places beautiful beach beautiful lush jungles the best swimming water nicest people too oh the filipino people are some of my favorite people man like you want to talk the guys that we worked with out there they're uh scout i think they're called scout sniper scout rangers and they were special i think they were like their special forces we go to the range with these guys and show them stuff and they're the most um ride or die type of guys you'll ever meet in your life like you know so and so said this about you last week and i could kill him it's like no dude it's cool it's like don't worry about it like fun fact there's some of the best pool players on earth too oh really great some of the greatest pool players of all time came out of the philip they're just great people i mean i just the people down there were fantastic and it was awful because those guys would be bombing churches christian churches and stuff like that and uh they're doing counter operate like i said counter um um intelligence operations out there doing intelligence operations collection to inform that battle picture but those guys had direct links with Osama Bin Laden and other people.

1:10:53I had no idea. Right after we, like I said, I think it was, I think if you look it up, I think his name is Patek, P-A-T-E-K. And he was arrested outside of Osama Bin Laden's compound and we had been chasing him in the Philippines. Wow. Because we thought he was still down there. There was another guy that we, I believe we killed him. His name was Albeder Parad. But yeah, my job was not, I always say this on podcasts because the veteran community is wild right now. they love to cut each other down right now there's something weird going on where like obviously lying yeah call the people out i prefer to call people out face to face um but uh i always make sure people know i was not a cool guy like sometimes i got to dress like one you know for a few years i didn't wear any uniforms and i got to grill my beard out and act like a cool guy but i was really a nerd for cool guys i've literally got pictures of myself down in the in the holo or in afghanistan or anywhere else and tape around my glasses and you know pez dispenser and my radio and collection equipment looking like a true blue american nerd but i was not the guy who kicked the door and i was always the guy pointed the door out so i'd be safe in the humvee in the back you know eat an mre and somebody that looked like another gorilla you know like an annie stump or tim kennedy or someone like that i'd be like is that the house i'd be like pretty sure that's the house you guys might want to be safe but go ahead i'll be in the humvee i'll be out here or i'll be in an airplane above you know um and uh yeah it was it was being born in North Dakota and, and, uh, you know, my mother, single mother, after she left that first guy, um, trailer house in the middle of this little town called Cavalier, North Dakota.

1:12:31I had no options. I was a horrible student. And, uh, what did that's crazy that you're so smart, but you were a horrible student. I wouldn't, yeah, I wouldn't, I call myself curious before I'd call myself smart. But, um, uh, you know, my mother, you know, I don't know if we remember, you would remember this but maybe other people my age you know you get these scholastic book order forms that you'd bring home from school and you could order books there'd always be on the back page there'd always be like little cool stuff like you could get like you know a pair of gloves or a hat or something anyway one time there was a um a coil radio that you could order with an earpiece and you put this coil radio together and with an earpiece no battery it was just the electromagnetic Radiation would activate the coil and the coil would, you could listen to radio chatter.

1:13:19Really? With no battery? Yeah, yeah. Just tiny little radio. How did it, what was the power? The electromagnetic radiation. And you would just kind of like a record, like, you know, how you hit a record. Electromagnetic radiation would hit the coil and the coil would feed up to an amplifier or up to an earpiece and the earpiece you could hear chatter and you could tune it. Did the earpiece have a battery? I don't think anything had a battery on it. I think it was just a... Wow. I could be mistaken, but I don't believe it was. Powered by electromagnetic radiation. Yeah. I mean, you can look it up, Jamie, if you want.

1:13:52Sorry to say that again, but... Tighten that thing down. That thing's driving me crazy. Yeah, sorry. This thing. Like here or here? Right here. Look at my finger. It's right here. Yeah, I've been meaning to do that, like, literally when everybody uses this fucking thing. It's wobbling around, ready to fall off. Yeah, but if you look up coil radio with small earpiece, I could be wrong. I don't remember there being a battery on it. Electromagnetic radiation powered it. That's bananas. Yeah, so kind of like the same thing with like, you know, not the same wattage, but a microwave, right? Sends power through the air.

1:14:21Right, but it uses. Or DC. But it uses power in order to send it. Yeah, but I could be wrong. But at any rate, that was the first time I got a radio. And I was hearing things. And I'd put it together and I'm listening to things. Like what kind of things? uh hf radio vhf radio people talking that type of stuff and um it was just and then i found out how to get an antenna to make the antenna larger and started ordering auxiliary pieces for it and then what really changed me was my mother let me get a my mother and i would clean houses she was a waitress but we also would go around and clean houses and there was a lawyer that we worked for his name was phil culp and um he had a old 286sx ibm and uh it was just sitting in his basement and I told my mom I was like hey if I clean for like a month can I have that computer like he doesn't use it he's got a new 486 up in his place here and he instantly said I could have it and then that started me down the computer networking realm and like look how could I get this 286 to act like a 386 or how could I force it to run windows or how do I update the memory how do I do these things in this little town Edinburgh North Dakota there was a guy who had a computer store in a basement of an old general store and his name was Jeff Munsobraten And I would go there and ask them questions about computers and just start learning like ins and outs on how do I update the RAM?

1:15:38How do I get memory better? How do I augment the storage? How can I force this thing to run Windows 3.1 so I could have a GUI instead of using a command line? GUI mean graphic user interface? Graphic user interface, yeah. Yeah, sorry. That's okay. And so that kind of started me on that. And for me, like I said, I had all kinds of problems with attention deficit disorder. and not being able to pay attention. That was the only time I would go for. I don't believe in ADHD. I might be wrong. I think it's a superpower. I mean, it certainly, I remember I would spend two days working on a problem and not sleeping.

1:16:17That's what I'm saying. I think it's a superpower. I think it just keeps you from being interested in things you're not interested in. Yeah, I have a theory on that too that I can get into after, but that started me down that road. But in school, I couldn't pay attention. Me neither. There was this teacher. I always tell this story. It's a great teacher. She's still around. Her name is Connie Trenbeth. And she was my English teacher or literature teacher or something like that. She might not even remember this story, but here I am telling it on your podcast. I remember it. She kept me after class once.

1:16:47And she goes, you know, I knew your dad, Bill. And, you know, your uncles were all smart. And my great uncle has an engineering wing of a school named after him out in western North Dakota. and she goes, all these guys were thinkers and your dad did all this great stuff and built all this stuff. And essentially what she was telling me is you're a waste of life. Like all you do is you come in here and you disrupt the class, you upset people. No one can talk. Sounds like me. You're trying to dominate every conversation. But when, you know, you had written one paper on something that interested you and I don't remember what it was.

1:17:24And she's like, that was a wonderful paper. She's like, if you could just do that every time. and uh i was not hearing it like i remember the conversation because i actually remember i think she said waste of life i think she actually said that like you're wasting like you're obviously my rp my cpu clocks high i'm always thinking even when i'm not thinking and even as we're sitting here talking i'm thinking about other things or stuff i want to do when i get back to my computer stuff i want to do for my business and um and so i joined the military and the the absurdity of life is this, I joined to be a military policeman, which I absolutely would have hated.

1:18:04All of them got turned into infantry people or stand gate guard, which is a needed function in the military, but it doesn't apply to my personality. But when I went to the recruiter station out in Minneapolis, I think it was, I was a bonehead and I forgot my driver's license. And they're like, well, and I was supposed to leave. And at this time I dumped my girlfriend, told everyone goodbye. I'd wipe the dust off my boots like left Cavalier, North Dakota and I was like hey, I'm not going back. So Whatever we got to do right now and he's like well we can you can go home get your license because The MEPs station was in Minneapolis.

1:18:42Was it Fargo? It doesn't matter. It was five six seven hours away And they're like well, you're not leaving today without a driver's license So I looked at my recruiter and I was like, I don't know what job you need to get me into, but it needs to be a different job. And they're like, well, you scored, you know, exceptionally high in your general technical part of your ASVAB, which is like understanding machines and objects and stuff. So we could get you into this like Intel job where you'd learn about radars and stuff. And that immediately clicked for me. And then he's like, well, we got to go brief you in this SCIF room.

1:19:13There's a, you know, secure compartmented information facility. there's only one guy who's got a clearance and he can brief you on the job and if you want that job then you can leave tomorrow i instantly started hearing like the james bond music you know and so they walked me in this back place and you know nothing super crazy and briefed me up on the job and i went back out and i said yeah this is actually the job for me so the absurdity of life is me forgetting my driver's license when i was 16 i was 16 when i signed up um maybe 17 no i was turning 17 that December when I signed up for the military.

1:19:49Um, I can connect with a string to forgetting my driver's license to being here with you today. You can, you can sign up when you're 16. I think I was turning 17. You can sign up when you, I didn't even know you could sign up. I had signed my delayed entry program thing. Um, and I left a little bit before my 18th birthday. So I was graduated from high school, but, um, yeah, you can sign up when you're 16. I believe as long as your parents signed the waiver. My mother signed the waiver. She was happy to get me out of the trailer. So, yeah, I was 17, almost 18 when I left. You can make a radio out of that.

1:20:22Yeah, right there. So that's all the pieces. They called it crystal radio. Yeah, I was going to say crystal controlled. That's a radio? What? There it is. That's actually the exact thing. That looks almost, that is almost exactly what it looked like. Slinky made it? Well, they bought the brand. They just led the Slinky brand now. What? Bought this toy. But there's a bunch of these all over the internet, yeah. Wow. Wow, make your own working radio without batteries. Yeah, and it uses a—I was going to say crystal-controlled radio because it uses a crystal diode on it. Would you say Tesla coil, Jamie?

1:20:51Yeah, it's a Tesla coil. This guy's explaining it. So this thing has a kind of cool—let me find this thing. A rocket radio, they called, which is a further development, this thing. It attached to a phone. So you plug that onto a phone cable. There's a picture of it somewhere on here. but it explains like you're picking up. There you go. Wow. No power. No battery or current needed, hence no operating expense and long life. Yeah, this is almost. Let's face it onto a phone. What year was this? Man, this is old. Yeah. It also shows here. This is like you're picking up power from a radio tower. Yeah, wow.

1:21:32The more powerful the signal. This is kind of like what they're paying for at the FCC. see the more powerful your radio tower the longer and more people you can reach crazy that has no battery and that's also why some radio signals come in very well on your radio and some don't it's like dog shit yeah weak power yeah and then the frequency modulation like amplitude modulation isn't as efficient as frequency modulation when it comes to for the vocorder to produce sound Amplitude modulation travels farther, but it doesn't have the amount of information. It's not modulated. The carrier wave can't be modulated with as much information as you need, whereas frequency modulation is much quicker, megahertz.

1:22:15And you can amplitude and add more sound or more information, which is why it sounds better. So FM sounds better, but it doesn't travel as far. Right. AM sounds worse. I always when I was training people in the military on this I always use the analogy of if a party is happening next door you can hear the bass music You can't hear the treble you can hear the bass music because that frequency travels farther because it's lower in their frequency band But you can hear the treble because or you can't hear the treble i'm sorry because it's higher frequency and there's more Modulation and so it disperses quicker and you can't hear it as well And it's the same thing with like VLF comms coming off of like a submarine can travel underwater for a very long ways.

1:22:55But you can't put as much information in them as you could if you were doing, you know, VHF or UHF comms where there's lots of modulation. So it's the dispersal. And, you know, a lot of my, you know, mid part of my career was explaining this stuff to, you know, military guys who were trying to understand, like, here's how a cell phone works. And this is how frequency works. And this is how we send information. and just kind of demystifying how a GSM network works. One of the things that I wanted to ask you about that is when new technology is emerging, how do you stay ahead of the ability to extract information from this technology, hack into networks before people understand the capability?

1:23:47You really can't. You really can't? And that's the beauty of the free market is that the innovation to perform the function that you want someone to pay for will always move faster than your ability to exploit the technology. Then how do you explain things like Pegasus? Well, I mean, something like Pegasus. Well, first off. Explain Pegasus to people that don't know. It was a persistent implant on cell phones for people. Initially, you had to click it. It was a clickable exploit. It was a click and then it became a non-click exploit. So in other words, you had to interact with something on the phone in order to initialize and install the implant.

1:24:25And then after – but the reason why it was so good is because it wasn't stored in the usual areas that you would want a persistent implant or where you would have a persistent implant. For instance, you might want to put it in the application layer of an app or something like that where there's a binary that can run and execute commands or functions. And so I won't get into the very specifics of where and how they did this because I'm not sure if I got this information from the government or not, so I won't say it. But they stored it in a place where it wasn't normal. And you can read papers on your own and look at the forensics of it and how the actual implant was executed.

1:25:08but it essentially, you know, all people that own your phone. Um, and, and, uh, you know, was the kind of implant I only dreamed of when I was helping develop my own plants implants in the military. Mostly what we would rely on is, um, you know, zero day architecture and looking for something in a phone that either they hadn't patched or that the phone that you were looking at hadn't been patched. So phones, as they have their own red teams are going through the phone for their own because they want to sell a product that people will use and people won't use stuff that can get hacked so they'll do their own red teaming and they'll discover like oh you know we we on this router we developed we left this port open and it shouldn't have been open so now we're going to write a patch that will close that port so that this port is no longer accessible by a guy like me so i can't go in there and and do something to this particular type of router another great thing i'll say something good about the administration they're they're doing some stuff right now to make sure that we're getting rid of chinese technology and chinese routers and you know there's a widespread network of them there's the PLA has a and I can't remember the name of the botnet but they essentially implanted a bunch of old unpatched routers to get access to government and business proximal people and it was widespread and huge and you know they looked like to me I haven't read this anywhere but if I were looking at this implant and how it was done, they were trying to really cause some trouble.

1:26:37It was being placed at critical places. Think power, think energy, think banking. Like they really wanted to cause some ruckus. And I have not been part of this administration, so I'm not saying anything classified for those of you who are listening. But there was a decision to say, hey, we need to make sure that these things get patched and also that we're not bringing in architecture from the overseas because they don't play by the same rules that we at least say we play by. That's why they banned Huawei devices. Oh, yeah, and ZTE. Yeah. Well, Huawei had a phone that I was really interested in back in the day.

1:27:11They had a Porsche design had partnered with Huawei and made this insane Android phone with, like, the best camera, the best battery. It was, like, really high level. And I was, like, going to buy it. And then all of a sudden they banned all the Huawei phones. And I was like, what's going on? And then, you know, I had heard some people say, oh, they're just trying to stop competition. It's like American companies are trying to stop it. And then I went into it deeper and I said, no, it seems like there's third-party input on some of their routers and some of their network devices that they had engineered in order to be able to access them by third party.

1:27:49And this because of whatever lack of understanding, lack of knowledge of how these things are constructed, the people that purchased them didn't weren't weren't aware of them. And these things had gotten into place and they had gotten into place in universities. They got into place in military establishments. They were using them in cell phone towers that people, you know, inadvertently bought from China. Yep. And that's really, I mean, I can tell you firsthand from having done some other forensic exploitation on this stuff. Another large part of my career I didn't talk about was just on mobile forensics and media forensics, which is essentially you think of like CSI Miami or CSI whatever the city was.

1:28:30There's a crime. Someone was killed. You have forensics that are doing forensics on like blood and fingerprints and blood splatter and all that stuff. there's a whole another part of that same forensics branch that focuses on media forensics what was deleted off this phone at one point what remains on this phone what was it being used for i would do this in the military so that when we did do an operation and i was part of some of the largest ones ever done out in afghanistan uh there would be treasure troves of phones and all of these computers and stuff like that and it was my job and i had a great team that worked for me in 20, my deployment in 2015, we would go in afterwards, gather up all of this stuff.

1:29:09And, you know, the task force commander would literally be standing by and we'd say, you know, here's the intelligence that we've derived. Here's the multi-point analysis here. You know, it was on this hard drive. It was here. It was here. You know, there's a bad guy place out here. And those guys would be rolling like within moments after the last operation, like some operations we do where we'd be rolling one after another target because we were getting really good at media forensics and the intelligence that was there and then getting into active media forensics, which is a different discipline, but essentially I'll get it.

1:29:39I can get into that later if you want to. But launching and doing these follow on operations off, you know, dumping the binary from a phone and examining it at the ones and zeros level to say everything that was going on with this thing, or if it was a really high, like the organization that I worked for at that time did the analysis of the Osama bin Laden media. And on that media, we're doing far more than we would for another piece of media in that we're X-raying it and we're looking at maybe what the disk looked like before or what was destroyed or reconstructing things, spending millions of dollars on that intelligence analysis because we wanted to fully understand everything that this guy was involved in and what he was doing and where he was and who he was talking to.

1:30:22and so that was another part of my career that I did for about five years or so what was going on with the Huawei phones like what were they doing with them I mean they were there were there were either some of them were coming out implanted in other words there was access built in for a foreign actor and then other in other terms other places with routers with the ZTE stuff there were just things that you would patch or that you would fix as a company who was trying to protect the consumer and create a product that would people you would use and they weren't doing it. So they were creating persistent back doors, either by actively placing code on there that would allow, you know, root access, or they were leaving things open, especially in Africa, like the work that, you know, when I was working in Africa, the Chinese were just owning Africa, they were just giving them communications infrastructure.

1:31:09And they were doing that because they wanted their resources and they wanted to know what these people were saying and what they were doing. and so I'm a free market real like I'm as free market as a guy can get I want the best people building the best products and I want everyone to be able to compete but in that case I would never own a Huawei or a ZTE or anything else on a consumer level what were they doing with those phones like if they had imported them to the United States if they didn't have that ban what would have been the issue uh getting access to you know any number of people that the Chinese really want access to everybody.

1:31:45But you could start at the topical level of just saying, you know, getting Joe Rogan to use his ETE would be, that'd be my wet dream as a guy who used to do this work back in the day, because you're talking to the president, or you're talking to this guy or that guy. And I can build out a network of understanding who you're in contact with, who you're talking to, what's being talked about. But then also finding out, you know, this person's phone number, and now doing a deep dive on there. So it's really about, you know, Getting all of that data and constructing an analyst notebook essentially outline of who's talking to who, who do we need to implant.

1:32:19But it's for business as well. They would want this in the hands of somebody who's in charge of a business because they want their IP. They would want this in soldiers' hands so they would know deployment dates or who's going where and who's doing what. They want this in routers because routers are usually the most unpatched piece of technology. These days, they're more automated patching. But back in the day, like you had to manually update a router. And if you didn't, well, then you had potential exploits that were sitting on that router where I could gain access to the router in your home. Or I could gain access to a BGP router, which is like a border gateway, which is moving all of the Internet data.

1:32:55Or I could get access to a microwave terminal. You know, if you look at a cell phone, you've got the microwave terminals on there that are sending information in between them. If those are Chinese parts that are either being used for the processing, the CPU, or the physical infrastructure of that, the products that they were putting out would give me direct access to the information that's being passed on those terminals. So you're getting system-level, root-level access through machinery, through communication devices, and through things like routers where you can know everything you want to know about your enemy.

1:33:29Wow. And so as far as today's technology, I see you use an Android phone. Is there a phone that is more secure or a platform that is more secure? It all depends. Like I always take this from Thomas Sowell. There are no answers. There are only tradeoffs. So there's like the way to answer that question would be is like, who are you? What are you trying to do with your life? What are you talking about on your phone? What are you doing on your phone? And, you know, most of these phones, if you're just an average everyday citizen who's just going about your job, you know, the phones today are pretty secure, especially versus a few years ago.

1:34:06If you're a reporter, now the nexus is do you trust the government and do you trust Apple? If you trust the government, you trust Apple, then Apple is probably your best bet for using – you know, there's lockdown mode on an Apple phone or they used to call it back in the day. I think it was called reporter mode, but there was ways to encrypt the devices and to encrypt the chatter and the tunnel coming out of the phone, the RF coming out of the phone. What is lockdown mode? I don't know if that's exactly what it was called or not because I've never really used Apple just for my own personal reasons.

1:34:41What personal reasons? I don't trust Apple. How so? They are more interested in monetizing people's data than they are providing them capability. So every time you take a photo, every time you upload a document, every time you talk to it, every time it asks you about your, you know, you'll get these questions where it says, if your password's lost, you can back up your password in these ways. Tell us where you were born. Tell us your mom's maiden's name. Tell us your mom's this, your mom's that. Lockdown mode is an extreme optional protection. It can only be used if you believe you may be personally targeted by a highly sophisticated cyber attack.

1:35:15Most people are never targeted by attacks of this nature. When iPhone is in lockdown mode, it will not function as it typically does. Apps, websites, and features will be strictly limited for security, and some experiences will be completely unavailable. Yeah, so when I was advising guys back in the day on going out and doing like a high-risk source meet, so they're going to go meet a spy for another country, and you're a military guy, and you're debriefing someone or doing something, I would always tell them to use lockdown mode. I knew that it did those things. I didn't know if that was the term or if I'd thought that up.

1:35:45So can you still send iMessages? You can still text and call. Text and call, that's it. Yeah, but there's other things that you can't do. Well, like Meta just recently announced they're no longer encrypting your DMs. Why would they do that? Well, they said that it's for protection or whatever to make sure that people aren't doing bad things. I don't know. See what their explanation for it was. What was it? Sorry, I'm worried about this reporter. I'm sorry. meta meta recently announced that they're no longer encrypting your dms on instagram and a lot of people are up in arms and they're stopping using any dms on instagram and any of that stuff and the idea is that other people can read your stuff now now whether it's meta can read your stuff or who that's what i mean yeah i said why don't you trust apple it's the same reason i don't trust meta they're not just the dangers behind meta killing end-to-end encryption for Instagram DMs meta blamed users for not opting into the privacy protecting feature experts fear the move could be the first major domino to fall For end-to-end encryption tech world that's a horrible narrative mmm.

1:36:53Yeah, it seems squirrely So oh you've read your last free article Oh my god, give me money motherfucker But but what Apple and meta want to do is like they're trying to build these new neural networks They're trying to you know humans and we can get into this too later if you want Humans are the only thing in my opinion and I'm happy to have you disagree with me and I love to have this conversation in my opinion, we're the only ones that are after May 8 2026 Now it's plans discontinue support for end-to-end encryption for chats on Instagram If you have chats that are impacted by this change, you will see instructions on how you can download any media or messages you may want to keep.

1:37:35Social media giant said in a help document, if you're on an older version of Instagram, you may also need to update the app before you can download your affected chats. When reached for comment, this is what Meta had to say, very few people are opting for end-to-end encrypted messages and DMs, so we're removing this option from Instagram in the coming months. Anyone who wants to keep messaging with end-to-end encryption can easily do that on WhatsApp. But WhatsApp is a little squirrely, right? Yeah, I mean, they're all squirrely. And that's the problem. And so you asked me why I don't trust them.

1:38:04It's because they want to use... So humans, in my opinion, and some animals, are the only things that have the ability to project consciousness. And projecting consciousness is how you train a neural network. And it's how you train all these large networks. A lot of my time also in the military spent in our... I was doing artificial intelligence in 2012, 2011. Before it was even a catch term, we were using artificial intelligence to map dynamic networks and to do other things, more pragmatic uses of it than how it's being used today with large language models or convolutional neural networks. But they need consciousness to train their models.

1:38:41So when Google offers you Meta or Instagram or whoever else offers you photo storage, it's because they want your face to train neural networks. If they're going to pay for the compute, if they're going to pay for the storage for these things, they're doing it because they're going to use the data. If you're getting a free app, in essence, any free app, if the product's free, then you're the product. So when Google is allowing you to use a Google Drive and get a gig of storage, they're going to use those photos to train neural networks to do better facial recognition. What if you're paying for Google Drive?

1:39:14I don't know about their terms of service now. That is one of the best things that I use with large language models is any product I download, I have the neural network examine the terms of service. And then you can pretty much understand, like, here's my focus. Here's the 40-page terms of services document when you click that link that you got. What are they able to do with my data? So that's how I sign up for apps. And that's one of the great uses of a large language model, in my opinion, is to quickly understand how these things are being used. And that's why I say with Apple, with Meta, with all of these large information, you are more the product than the product's the product.

1:39:49And that is because they're trying to build the most powerful, capable artificial intelligences, which I think is a misnomer. And again, we can get into it later. But they're trying to build these hyper-competent artificial intelligences. And you need two things for that, really, is training data and you need compute. and that's why you start seeing them coming out with like Metis building its own nuclear engineering facility or something nuclear facility or something like that and they need more they need more training data so if I want to build a you know a replica of Joe Rogan that I can make hyper-realistic AI videos for I need every picture of your face from every angle I need every wince every squint everything you've ever done so I can introduce more training data to better train that neural network in order to generate more hyper-realistic versions of yourself.

1:40:37And so when a company's offering you something for free, and it's fine. Like if people are fine with that idea, then by all means, download all the free apps that you want. But if you're downloading a free app, it's because you are the product. They either want to see how you type. They want to see what you're saying. They want to see how you're thinking about things. They want to understand your political biases. They want to look at your photos. And this isn't because they're a deep-seated nation state actor that can become that. But it's because they're trying to build the best products because the big money is in AI.

1:41:07That's where the biggest money is. So anytime you're doing any of these things, and it's just been obvious to me from the on, not from the onset, but pretty close to the onset that, um, yeah, this is a good example, right? Pokemon Go players built a 30 billion photo map. That's how training robots deliver your pizza. There you go. Um, so you, You know, they view – and they can say they don't. And maybe if someone from there catches this podcast, which they well could, they might put out a statement that's saying that that's not what they're doing. But I'm telling you as a person who has done media forensics, who has done computer network operations, and who has trained artificial intelligence models, that is precisely what they are doing.

1:41:47That is – there's no – And what is the difference between using Apple and using Android? Well, Android will do the same things and Google will do the same things. It's just that I can root my phone or I can install a custom operating system like graphene or something like that, which I'm not doing right now. I had to make a sacrifice when I started my company Spartan Forge. And the sacrifice was I had to be the face of this product. And so I never had a social media until I started the company. And I didn't upload things to the cloud until I started this company. And it became just like I have to sell a product.

1:42:21I have to, you know, and I'm actually selling a product, not people's data or people's photos. I have to sell this product. I have to let people, people often don't know who is the company or who is the organizing principle and what do they care about in the company. And I just made that trade and said, I'm going to have to become a public person and start putting things out there. And, uh, so, you know, I started a company, we started our first Instagram and I started my, my marketing team started my first Instagram and, uh, I had to start uploading things and talking about how I felt about things because I wanted people to know that this company was not going to be like the other companies that are out there.

1:42:58We don't sell their data. We don't sell emails. I can make a half million dollars off my email list tomorrow. And I've been offered that money. You know, we've got millions of emails from people who have signed up for our apps. Other companies who are starting companies, they want to go out and reach marketing people. So if you're starting another hunting app, maybe for cameras or for a call or a tricky call or an out call or something and you found Spartan Forge and you said, man, they've got two million emails. I could pay them a half million dollars for that two million dollars and start some top of mark top of line marketing, top of funnel marketing and go blast them.

1:43:33So they'd pay me a lot of money for those emails. I will never do that. I'll never sell my company's emails, the people's emails. I'll never do any of those things because the product is the product for my company. It's not the people. So the reason why you use Android over Apple is the ability to root it and install things like Graphene? Yeah, custom OSs. But yet you don't use it? Not now, but what I still can use and what I still do use is Android also publishes their framework in an open source fashion where you can look at the Android. It's called AOSP, Android Open Source Project. So the basis of Android, think of it as the nuts and bolts.

1:44:13I'll try not to talk in two technical terms here. But the basic framework, think about it like a car. The frame and the engine makeup is published so you can look at how things work on the inside. Apple goes the opposite way and they don't publish any of that. You can't see any of that stuff. I'm for the free and open version because at least if I'm worried about my phone having a problem, I can actually dump binary or I can create an E01 file and exhume. I can look at the binary and say, is my phone acting like it should or doing what it should? Or is there some kind of persistent implant? I wouldn't be able to do that with a – I would have to trust Apple and Apple's ecosystem and whoever they're – McAfee or whatever they're using.

1:44:52I would have to trust them, which I don't. So I like the Android because – Is that option available for the average consumer that's not that learned in computers? Well, the great part about large language models now is if you wanted to dump your own phone today, you could follow along with a large language model and do it. Your own Android. And how would you do that? Well, there's – you would have to buy some expensive – there is some thing – you'd either have to pay a firm to do it or you could download things like Celebrite. You could get a Celebrite or there's other things called forensic toolkit, other things like that that allow you to examine your phone at a deeper level.

1:45:32And is this an app, Forensic? They're products. Products. They're products. So it's a physical product that you dump your phone into? Yeah, and there's software. And there's connecting and all that type of stuff. Tools I used throughout my military career, Celebrite was one of them, but they're Israeli-owned. I've got nothing against Israel. I've just got everything against foreign actors. Just if they're not an American company, that automatically kicks them down a level for me. So anyway, there's all kinds of... Android just makes it much easier to examine your phone or to understand if you've got something going on that's funky than it is on Apple.

1:46:10So for the average person, like for me, like if I got the average person, if I got an Android phone and I wanted to examine my phone, what would I what would be the process? You would download some of the software that I talked about. You jack your phone into it. You would open your phone and then it would start carving the binary of everything in your phone. You could create a one-to-one emulation of your phone if you wanted to. And then you would be able to get under the hood and examine the apps. You would be able to examine the binary. What's the executable code? You'd be able to look at all of those things and then determine because Android open source project is published, you could do a one-for-one and say, well, at the kernel level, there's this weird code that's not in the Android build.

1:46:56So what is this code? And then with a neural network, I've never done it, but I'm sure you could figure out what the intent is of that code, even for a layperson. So I could take that information, I could put it into perplexity, and perplexity would lay out what's going on with it? Ostensibly, it would be able to, yes, unless it was some type of weird code. I don't know if, I haven't used Perplexity, so I don't know if they have something like ChatGPT's Codex. I sort of just tried just to be like, can you help me examine my Android phone is doing, looking for any malicious actors? Yes, I can walk you through structured, non-destructive, check for malware or other shady activity on your Android phone.

1:47:33A first, what are you noticing? For tools, commands, quickly check for common warning signs, sudden big battery drain, you're not using the phone, unusual data usage, particularly in the background, apps you don't remember installing or icons briefly appearing and then disappearing. Lots of pop-ups, redirects in browser, or new default search launcher, strange calls, SMS messages you didn't send yourself. If any of those ring a bell, we'll focus on them in later steps. Yeah, just asking you, like, why do you want to do that? So this is just something that you could do with an Android phone that you just can't do with Apple.

1:48:04Yeah, Apple's not open. What are the reasons you don't trust Apple? Well, could I ask, can I do one thing before we, remember that question because I want to forget it. Could I give you a prompt? Sure. because I want to answer your first question that we've already gone past. Can you bring perplexity back up, please? Do you want to go in addition to that or start a new one? No, this is fine. Just say, my friend helped me carve an EO1 file, Echo Oscar EO1 file.

1:48:34and he says that there is code in there that doesn't comport with the rest of the Android system. Comport? Yeah, P-O-R-T. With? The rest of the system. Could I dump that code here and could you tell me what it means? I'm sure the answer is yes, but I just didn't want to answer it because I've never done it. Could you tell me? Could you tell me, Jimmy? Could you tell me what it means? Yeah.

1:49:09Get the you out. Get the you. Tell me you. Could I have some of your coffee, please? Yeah, absolutely. It's for you. Okay, let's see what it says.

1:49:21Yes, you can paste suspicious code here, and I can help explain what it appears to do line by line and whether anything looks malicious before you paste a few important notes. Remove or redact anything that looks like private data, usernames, passwords, keys, tokens, IPs, email addresses, phone numbers. Perplexity is our sponsor. I love that because you'd never get that from ChatGPT. You'd want all that information. Perplexity is the shit. And so you're not sharing personal or case-sensitive information. Wonderful perplexity. If it's very long, send in chunks and tell me chunk 1-3, chunk 2-3, et cetera, so we can help keep track.

1:49:59I can do static analysis here read and reason about the code, but I cannot actually execute it in a sandbox Right, so this is more like a careful forensic read through than a full dynamic malware analysis Go ahead and paste the code snippet your friend flag does not fitting with the rest of the system and tell me in a sentence or two Where in the EO1 it came from example app folder system partition random file path? Yeah, exactly so yeah, I thought that would be the answer I've just never done it. And so you can do a forensic examination of an Apple, by the way. I'm sorry if I misspoke there. But you can't do it to the level that you can with – because the Android Open Source project publishes all of the code, I can get an understanding of the very inner working.

1:50:44So if something is being done, for instance, at the kernel, or you could think about it as like the lowest level of the phone, something that wouldn't normally get caught in a forensic examination, I wouldn't be able to do that with Apple. Right. So and the nation state actors are doing are doing things at very low levels in the code framework for that exact reason, because most people who aren't very deep into forensics would miss that. It'd be like the fingerprint under the couch cushion or something like that. And what is the difference between what what someone can do with an Android phone with the standard Android operating system versus graphene?

1:51:23uh so that gets into you know if you wanted to war drive or sample um wi-fi networks in an area or if you wanted to run a barrage attack on a wi-fi endpoint you could work that in there to do things with the phone that you couldn't otherwise do with a standard app with a standard android operating kit but as far as on a consumer level like what protections do you have by running graphene that you don't have by running Android? You're much more in control of the ecosystem. You have a firmer understanding. And again, you could use a large language model to do this, to understand exactly what's being run on the phone.

1:52:02You control the background services that can be run on the phone. So if you're getting hot mic'd or if your camera's taking pictures of you and you're not looking or it's listening to you for advertising content, stuff like that, you would be in control of all of that in a way that you're not in control of on a native Android app. and control it. How so? Would it alert you that this is happening? Or just the functionality wouldn't be there for it to take place. Right, because the functionality is only designed for the standard Android operating system. And I haven't installed Graphene in a while.

1:52:30So all of this updates, and I could be saying things that are incorrect. I stopped doing this about three years ago. I know that there was, I forget what country it was, but they were focusing on people who use Google Pixel phones, for example. Yeah, because that's one of the phones that are more commonly rooted. Yeah, it's easy to do. And you could do it with a large language model. You could sit there and be walked through on how to do it, which is a great part of that. Is it complicated for a person like me that's not that astute? No, it's not something I would do with a phone that you care about the first few times.

1:53:01Right. Because you're going to jack things up. You have to get the bootloader. And essentially the starting mechanisms of the phone that launches all of the other things, You have to get down to a level and unlock that so that you can— Is that available for all Android phones? No, not all Android phones. Lots of them lock it down, so you can't do that. Is that available for Samsung phones? No, not this one. So the question has to become, can you unlock the bootloader? And that is the starting—think of it as the starting engine of the rest of the phones. Why is that only available on Google Pixel phones?

1:53:32I'm not sure why they do it that way. I haven't looked into that. It was just pixels and the older Samsung's made it available. Older Galaxy S7s, S10s. You could do more than you can with like, and I've got the Galaxy Fold here and you can do almost none of that on here. That is fucking sweet though. Yeah, I love this phone. But like I said, I went away from doing all that A, because it was work. B, because I'm not working in national security anymore and I'm not, you know, I haven't written an exploit in years. I don't do this type of work anymore. and I need to sell a product. And just working with other employees that run my Instagram or assistant going through my email and all those other types of things, it just wasn't pragmatic anymore for me to keep doing that and I had to give up that part of myself.

1:54:18Your app run on Graphene? Yeah, well, it could. Yeah, it would. You have to sideload the app. But again, a large language model could walk you through doing that. So we haven't gotten to that level of... Does it make sense here that this says it's easier because Google makes it easier? Yeah, he was just asking me why they make it easier. I don't know that answer. So the process is officially supported in the Android settings under developer options, allowing users to toggle OEM locking. Simple fast boot method. Pixels use standard fast boot commands that work consistently across all models to unlock the bootloader.

1:54:54Accessibility. Yeah. That's what I was talking about. So, yeah, I don't know why they do it. It might be people can – well, the Android open source project exists. So it would stand to reason that you would want a way for someone because what you want is people interacting with that code and red teaming it and making the code better and then offering bug bounties so that you can tell Android like, hey, you've got a critical flaw in your system architecture here. And then they'll pay you$20 ,000 for that. I've got friends who do that. So – You and I talked about Eric Prince's phone. Yes. that which is so the narrative is that that is an unhackable phone.

1:55:34Yeah it's just by virtue and look Eric's a wonderful guy and he's the principles that he used for the first instantiation of that phone are the correct principles which is we need to get if you want if you're security focused at all you should get away from these big large conglomerates because none of your data is private. That's a correct principle. An incorrect principle, and I'm going to get shit about this, but I told you in the beginning, I care about the truth and I do care about the truth, is that when you're using a PKI subsystem that relies on Microsoft, then you're not in control of the PKI certificate signing and Microsoft could cause a bunch of problems and they were using that.

1:56:17So the other thing being, if you're building on the Android open source project, That means the code that you're using as the engine, let's just call it that of your phone, is examinable by the public. So you're relying on Android to publish these updates to the phone, and you're relying on those things to be as good as possible. Now, you might harden it some more, but as long as the code is out there, it can always be mucked with. As long as people have to interact with the device and type, and you have to see what you're typing, a phone's going to have Swiss cheese. So when people say something is unhackable, as you said, that's just not true.

1:56:55Yeah, it didn't make sense to me, which is why you and I talked about it. Yeah, we talked about it quite a bit. Like I said, great guy, done lots of great things for the country. And it's just if they had just said something along the lines of it's hackable as any phone is hackable, because by virtue of you having to interact with it, it's hackable. it just just like if I if I came up with an app that had a you know look at the tiktok terms of service on the first tick oh it's bonkers with those terms of services I will own your phone and I'm not saying you can install tiktok on his phone but what I'm saying is by virtue that you have to interact with the phone and see what you're doing and type passwords and you've got those kinds of terms of service I could easily put a key logger in that and now I know your signal password or your signal pin or, or, you know, I get you, you know, you're going to China.

1:57:44So I stop you in secondary. And while you're in secondary, I've got a CCTV on you and you unlock your phone. Now I know how to unlock your phone. And now I'm going to lock you up in secondary at, at customs in China or in Canada. And I'm going to separate you from your phone and I've seen you unlock it. Well, now I'm going to get in there with NCASE, or I'm going to get in there with FTK or I'm going to get in there with Celebrite and I'm going to dump your phone. And just by virtue of it being built on the Android open source project, that's a great thing. It's a good thing. Just don't call it totally unhackable because a guy like me, I don't need but a week or two to tell you on this current build, like here's the hole in this Swiss cheese.

1:58:26Now, is it far better than having a Google phone with standard firmware and standard OS or an Apple phone. I don't know about Apple because again, you asked me about Apple and I said, I don't know Apple. I don't know what's happening at the top of that company, but I know that they like to monetize people and that's pervasive in my mind. And using data that people don't know is getting used, even though it's in a 40 page terms of services document is pervasive. So I just don't know what that highest level of analysis. And that's why I said to answer your question about the safest phone, I would ask you what you're using it for, who you are and what are you doing in the world is the best way to answer that question.

1:59:04So me, like what would you recommend I use? I mean, I wouldn't want to, I mean, okay, I'll tell you generally what I would say because you might ask me that question one day because we go back and forth about a lot of tech. I know specifically what I would recommend for you to do. And I'd even tell you to hire someone else to do it and not me because that just, that checks and balances is what I would want. But for you, I would say you should take something like a Raspberry Pi and you should run WireGuard on your phone and you should route all of your Internet traffic through something like a home terminal at your house through a Raspberry Pi using something like WireGuard, which is a VPN that I use that's very good.

1:59:47And, you know, everything should be routed through that. And if you trust Apple, continue using Apple. If you don't trust Apple, then, you know, use Android. And you could use a pixel and do graphene and you could use signal on there and those other things. You're going to be relatively safe. But again, if I'm a nation state actor, I can create circumstances where I'm going to get access to your shit and I'm going to lock you down. And some of them are more expensive than other methods to do it. But I'm a pragmatist and you can always come up with a method to get a hold of somebody's shit. You can always create the circumstances, especially if you're a nation state actor, to get a hold of somebody's stuff.

2:00:27That would be the very high level of things that I would recommend to you just out the gate. Yeah, it's very concerning because it seems like these things keep getting stronger and more capable. Yes. Like the Pegasus 2 being a non-click exploit. Yes. So all they have to do essentially is just know your number. Yep. And that's, you know, you just make yourself a difficult target would be my best recommendation. When you're going to answer questions about password reset, don't answer them honestly. Write down in a physical journal or something how you answer those questions. Don't answer them honestly.

2:01:07You know, all of these things we think are added for layers of protection. For instance, you used to get that pop-up on your phone where it said, you know, there'd be like blocks of pictures. And it would say, click all of the pictures. Right. With a traffic light in it. I was just going to say that, a traffic light in it. Part of that might be for security. The other part of it is they're using the information of what you're clicking to train neural networks. Right. You're a product at that point. Right. You think you're getting security out of it, but you're a product at that point because you're helping to educate a neural network on what traffic lights look like.

2:01:39Yeah. And how they can look. And all those different instantiations of traffic lights. So and again, like we have to separate causality and intention and outcomes in that the companies might do this because they want to create the greatest AI ever. But when you're issuing someone a 40 page terms of service document on everything they can do with your thing that you paid$2 ,000 for, it's just, you know, we need more ethical people. at least what Eric Prince was trying to do was right, which was we need to off ramp from some of these big things because the way that this government is going, I'm very worried about the rights of the individual now and going forward because we have an uneducated class of people for all of the reasons in the world.

2:02:24Like if you want to just focus on your family and you're not thinking about these things, I don't hate that for you. But the idea of individual autonomy and rights has been so shit on in in recent years that where this when we get more uneducated and we rely large language models are great but they're not a foundation of learning in other words um we have a lot of people with access to information but no wisdom it's like when your parents would say learn how to do addition and subtraction on paper before you use a calculator like understand how to do research and cite sources and understand you know how to conduct really good analysis before you just use a neural network for everything because as we lose focus of our civics and and and what our founders are trying to do and the uniqueness of it which is truly unique which is you know when i joined the army i joined the army to get out of north dakota when i re-enlisted in the army it's because i believed in the experiment and that's a another five-hour podcast, but the foundation of the experiment is good, but we've eroded it in so many ways over the years and given up so many individual rights in the name of security.

2:03:32And I'm sure it's been said on here before, but Franklin said, anybody who gives up their individual rights in the name of security deserves neither. Your freedoms in the name of security deserve neither. And it's some of the ways that they've done it have been really above the surface. And it frankly blows my mind that we let the government get away with some of these things that we let them get away with, where you even explain it to people. And they're like, I don't see it. Like, I don't see how that was a big deal. And I'm like, it was a total recalibration of the system that allowed the Democratic Party and the Republican Party to usurp your rights in a way that if you knew any better, you'd probably be protesting.

2:04:11like some of the ways that they've done this you know we can go with the easy stuff like the patriot act right in the name of security we're gonna start collecting on americans you know and the biden and obama administration i will say this at risk of you know getting in trouble because i used to have a clearance They had a massive vacuum cleaner and they knew what it was vacuuming up and they kept vacuuming it up anyway in the name of security. I'm not saying they were going after American citizens, but they certainly knew they were and they just vacuumed shit up and collected it and stored it in a database.

2:04:47In case they need it. In case at some point we needed to, you know, come up with a narrative or get rid of somebody who's inconvenient or whatever else that just flies in the face of individual American rights and American autonomy and is really, in my mind, the anti-pattern to freedom. It's just really, really bad. I mean, I'll give you one that people always crap on me whenever I talk to them about it. But there's two that really bother me. One of them being like the 17th Amendment. Do you know the 17th Amendment of the Constitution? I don't. So when the founders, when you read the Federalist Papers and the Federalist Papers, I really love reading the Federalist Papers.

2:05:25I love reading how they informed the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration even. John Jay, James Madison wrote these documents explaining the framework. And the 17th Amendment, essentially how the Senate, the Senate, right, the 50 people there that are supposed to be representing us, was originally constructed was a state would have legislatures. and the state legislatures and the governor would appoint the senator. The reason that the founders did that was because the state governments had to give power to the federal government to exist. Back with the Articles of Confederation. Confederation, is that right?

2:06:03Articles of, I think it's Articles of Confederation. I'm blowing up. Sorry, I'm going nuts. Back before there was a strong centralized American government, we had problems with money, we had problems with interstate commerce and those types of things. And those articles eventually turned into what is the Constitution. But the states had to grant that power. And the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution knew that the states needed to be those small projects that we talked about before, where if California wanted to go nuts, let them go nuts. But it shouldn't impact what's happening in Texas.

2:06:34It shouldn't impact what's happening over in New England. It shouldn't impact what's happening in the Midwest. But if that goes nuts and it fails, it needs to fail. So the state senators, I'm sorry, the state legislatures would come together and they would vote for a senator. They would elect a senator. And that senator's job was to go to the federal government and protect the rights of the state, not to protect the rights of individuals per se, and certainly not to embolden the federal government. But with the 17th Amendment, what happened was the House of Representatives function was to be the petulant children of government.

2:07:09So their job was to come up with crazy ideas, crazy laws, all of those things. The more liberal version of government jurisprudence would be the House of Representatives, your crazy ideas. And then you had state senators who were supposed to be between the House and the president who would say, well, here's a good idea, but the rest of this is retarded AOC. Like we're not doing all this. That's crazy. Or whoever else. Name you a Republican who's an asshat as well. We're not doing these things. and that's because it would erode the state's rights and the state's constitution and what made this state great because what the legislatures would do is say hey joe rogan we you've made a lot of money and you've got a big podcast and a big voice and you've learned some lessons around the way and you're able to do that in texas and you decided to come to texas because we had all of these things that california didn't have we need you to go to the senate for three years or six years or seven years whatever it was back then and represent those same principles so when obamacare comes through, you can say not only no, but fuck no, like I'm not voting for this thing.

2:08:09And it was to protect the state. But what the 17th Amendment did was it was redundant with the House of Representatives, which was in the founders eyes, the only popular vote part of the constitute of the of the American government was the popular vote. And then you had, you know, the way the president gets elected through electors, but you had the state Senate, which was appointed by the states. So the legislatures and I'll I'll use North Dakota, where I'm from, You'll have one big city, two big cities, Fargo and Grand Forks, North Dakota. It's where the universities are. It's where your crazy kids are.

2:08:44Crazy thought exists. Hyper crazy ideas. But some of them are useful. The rest of the state's agriculture, right? So all of those legislators from all of those counties, those legislative districts would get together and say, we're going to put Bill Thompson. That would never happen. But in charge of he's going to be at the Senate representing North Dakota. But he has to represent the whole state. In other words, you can't do things that will help Grand Forks or Fargo because that's where the universities are. That's where all the crazy politics are. You also need to be thinking about the guys out in the western counties, Lemoore County in North Dakota or way out west.

2:09:17You have to protect agriculture. You have to protect small businesses. You have to protect families. What the 17th Amendment under Wundrell Wilson and how they really usurped the Constitution and made the Senate a redundant – they made it a redundant House of Representatives and using the popular vote. So now we use popular vote for that. But if you want the popular vote in North Dakota, 85 % of the population is in Fargo and Grand Forks. So now you've got, if I want to run for Senate in North Dakota, I'm just going to spend all of my time in Fargo and Grand Forks. Because if I can repeat back to those people all the ideas that they want to hear, I'm going to win that vote.

2:09:54And I don't have to represent those people out in the rest of the state in anything. So they created a redundant House of Representatives. But another reason why it happened was they wanted popular vote because there is no amount of money that you could stick into a legislature out in the western part of North Dakota. You can't bribe these people. But the DNC and RNC now can say, look, these two senators are running. We like this guy. So we're going to this guy will do whatever we tell him to do. And it has nothing to do with the state or representing the state's rights or the rest of those legislative districts.

2:10:23We're going to pick this senator and he's getting$300 million for his election bid. And this other guy who's, you know, a slower moving constitutional conservative who might be a free market absolutist and a classical liberal, he's not being funded. But under the state architecture, you might have been a better representation of the state. And that's why the legislators had to vote for you to put you in as a senator. You had to represent the whole state. But now all that someone who wants to be a senator needs to do is go to the Republican National Committee or the Democrat National Committee and say, I'll do all the things you tell me to do.

2:11:00Fund my campaign and I'm going to go stump in Fargo and Grand Forks, North Dakota and the hell with the rest of the state. It's very important. It's a very important sleight of hand. And when that happened, you made a redundant House of Representatives and the state no longer was protected at the federal level. And what happened was all of the power from all of these states and these legislatures and these individuals got sucked up into the federal government. And then after that, you see all of these things that would never have been passed by a state getting passed, things like Obamacare, things like the Patriot Act, certain war resolutions, all kinds of things where it just further erodes the power of the state.

2:11:39And federal government wants that because it puts all of the power up in the federal government. And people always say we need to get money out of politics. No, we need to get power out of politics. That power that they've taken over the last 130 years or so used to exist at the state and local levels because they wanted these thought experiments happening where we could pluck the best things out of them and forget the rest. But all of that power has now gone up to the federal government, and the federal government won't ever release that power, and they only want more budget and more spending to execute that power.

2:12:11And that's also because the interest groups that want to go, they don't want to have to go and convince the whole state of whether or not something is good that people are going to vote on. They just want to go take a lobby and go up to the federal government because they want all of the power up there as well. And the federal government wants all the power up there as well because they make$300 ,000 a year before they become a politician. And they're worth$30 million when they're done being a politician because all of the money has to go to the federal government because they're in charge of light bulbs we can use, computers we can use, flush toilets we can have, how our roads are going to look, what our medical care looks like.

2:12:45None of those powers are explicitly written in the Constitution of the United States. And they use things like the commerce law and other things in order to create things like Obamacare. where really we want competing states. If Texas comes up with a great way to do health care and North Dakota's isn't so great, they can look at that experiment, they can adopt the principles and they can have it at that level. But it's much easier to get change at the local level when the power is derived from the state and the individual because if I want to change the way that my state does health care, I have one of two options or three options.

2:13:17I can run for office, I can support someone who is going to go into office and do what I want or I can move. But when everything's centralized at the federal government and everything flows from the federal government, all of the money, power, and gravity is up there. And the individual, the 300 million of us or so, have really no power now to exercise either state's rights or individual rights at the higher level. I hope I'm elucidating this correctly. You are. But it's a real usurpation of individual and state autonomy that really got rid of state power, which was, if you read the Federalist Papers, was so important to the founders that there was this state – that the state's needs were organized because the state was where the founders wanted these thought experiments.

2:13:56You read Thomas Hobbes, Levis, or John Locke, or Montesquieu. All of them talked about this great experiment that was being set up and how it was built on all of this Western politics and everything that came before it, on how we could have a government that was forced to respect the rights of individuals and allowed for these competing think tanks of ideas, and that the power would never rest at the federal government. But the 17th Amendment was a way that a lot of that power went from the state level and the state legislatures. and now to become the president, they want to do a popular vote.

2:14:29And under a popular vote, you would just have to campaign in New York and LA. You would get the popular vote out of the likely voting people. And now the rest of the country is not. And that would be another, you hear all these people saying we need a popular vote. We can't have the electoral college. We can't have all of these things. Everything needs to be pure democracy allows 51 % to rule 49%. And that was another thing the founders were working fervently to get away from. And that's why we had an electoral college. And it's actually quite beautiful when you actually read about it and examine it.

2:15:03It's why we had the state senate and state legislatures. And this is why we had the house. You had all levels of the things of government that the founders cared about being represented in this body politic. And it was a beautiful thing. And I could go on for 15 more things about that. I won't do it for the sake of your listeners because I doubt this is what they wanted to do. But similar things happened with the Supreme Court, Marbury v. Madison, and allowing the Supreme Court to have judicial review. That was never a thing that was in the Constitution. And the Supreme Court, if you like the Supreme Court being able to have the power to describe everything as being either constitutional or unconstitutional, then you're not ruled by a democracy.

2:15:37You're ruled by an oligarchy. You've got eight people in robes that are going to tell you whether or not laws are good or bad. And that's not the founding of this country. It's not how it was intended to work. And that all started back in Marbury v. Madison with Thomas Jefferson and these writs of mandamus that where the Supreme Court, long story short, essentially granted itself the power to conduct judicial review under the old system or the system, old system, the system that was ratified and that the founders approved was if a law was deemed unconstitutional, it would go before the Supreme Court and they just wouldn't rule, they would rule in favor of the person.

2:16:11And then eventually the government would figure out, oh, this law doesn't work. But it was never on the Supreme Court to say constitutional, unconstitutional. You would get arrested for some law, and it would get appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court would say, we're not punishing this person. This is against the Constitution. But the government would have to keep arresting people. They'd have to keep going in front of the federal government. So what I'm saying is, and I'm sorry to go off on this, we can go back to tech, but all I'm saying is the core of the American experiment in individual rights and what makes this country so great and why I was willing to die for it after my initial enlistment.

2:16:45And why I have such love for this is because it was the only experiment where the value of the individual was held at the top of the hierarchy and that people could truly be allowed to flourish. And in 250 years, we did more than any society could have hoped to have achieved in tens of thousands of years, or not that it's been around that long, but in thousands of years, everything tends towards disorder and everything, power always gets centralized. And we had a framework to do that, but we were willing participants in our own demise. And now we're scratching our heads and wondering why there's no individual and why there's no individual autonomy, why a guy can't smoke weed on the weekend, or why a guy can't do X, Y, or Z, because we have centralized the authority and the power and the decision-making structure.

2:17:27And we're allowing them to be, there would be no problem with money in politics if the federal government had only the powers that were outlined to it in the constitution. I think that's very well said. and I could have never said it the way he said it. I think there's a lot to absorb here. I'm sorry. No, no, it was great, dude. It was great. This is one of the things that I love about you. You're very thorough. Thorough is one thing. My friends always say Bill's tism is starting to show. You got a touch of the tism, but I think that's good. Like I said, just like ADHD, I think it's a superpower.

2:18:00A lot to absorb. So I think we'll wrap it up right here. But thank you. This was an awesome conversation. I really appreciate it. It was really great. Yeah. We could do this again, too. I'm sure we could probably have 30 or 40 of these. We didn't even get to AI. I wanted to get to AI because I think I have a very anti-pattern to AI and how you understand it. But if you want, we can save that for another time. Yeah, we'll do that for our next one because I think that's another four hours. Yeah, probably. Yeah, for sure. And by then, who knows where it's going to be. I mean, Jensen Huynh from NVIDIA recently declared that we've reached AGR.

2:18:31Yeah, so I would – yeah, I could – yeah. I just couldn't disagree more. And I think I could, in the same way, I just hallucinate. You're not the only one. There's quite a few people. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's consciousness projection. And I'll sum it up in a minute. At the end of the day, neural networks are mathematical functions. They rest in, you know, weighting neurons based on training data and applying power to train models. It's all mathematic. There's no sense of knowing there in that, you know, Penrose, I've read a lot of, is ORC OR, if people want to read about that, I won't explain it, orchestrated objective reduction, and how the mind works in these fleets of consciousness that we have, these shimmers of consciousness that we have based around what he describes in the microtubule.

2:19:20We get conscious thought, and that conscious thought we project into things. AI is very good conscious projection, but it will never have consciousness or knowing because it has no system of values. And if we were to instill values in it, it would still be consciousness projection. You saw my dad's cabin. My dad died when I was five, but I bought it back and was working on it. And inside of his cabin, I got to learn a lot about my father by working on the cabin that he built. He would measure things and cut things right on walls and that type of stuff. That's all consciousness projection that allowed me to get to know him away.

2:19:52I might not have even known him if he were alive, but I got to re-experience and understand my father and his thoroughness through that cabin. AI is consciousness projection. It's projected consciousness. It's getting very good. But on a calculator, you could get the same thing that you get out of a neural network if you had sufficient time. I could present you a question just like you did on PropelXity. I could sit here with a rule book and I could type in a calculator. It might take me a million years, but I could do it. And I could give you the same answer that a neural network would give you.

2:20:23That doesn't mean consciousness or knowing or AGI is present. And it relies on its training data. It can only give you what the training data gives it. It needs human consciousness projection like we talked about with the CAPTCHAs or we talked about with uploading photos to Google Drive. It needs that training data. And to me, it's just really fancy, clever math. And having trained these networks for a dozen years now and working with them, they're just really clever consciousness projection. And so, yeah, that is four hours, and we can do that next time. We'll do that next time, definitely. But if people – you mentioned the app.

2:21:01By the time we do it next time, who knows what the fuck is going to be going on with AI, too. Yeah. But if people want to learn more about me or my company, if I can say that. Yeah, please. It's SpartanForge.ai. We're built under the rubric of individual freedom. I want people outdoors. I want people hunting. I want people experiencing nature. I want people providing for their families. The best part of my day is when my kids are eating a backstrap of an animal that I took. And I want to enable people to go out and do that. Even though it's paradoxical through an app, you can get lost. You've got to conserve time.

2:21:31You've got to e-scout. You've got to learn things before you go out there. So we built this company under that. It's one of my, I've got three other companies that I'm doing, but Spartan Forge is the one that I'm working on. It's an awesome app. Really working on. Well, I really appreciate that. We've put a lot of work into it and we've got a lot more coming over the summer. So if people want to support us or want to get out there and get some hunting done, please check it out. and I answer all the Instagram DMs. So if you want to have a question for me. Good luck with that now. Well, I try to.

2:21:56I spend about two hours every morning doing it. But good luck. Thank you, Joe, for having me. Thanks, brother. Appreciate you very much. Yeah, I did that. All right, you too. Bye, everybody.